Seeing the Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Dog: Q&A With the Director of 'Shepherd'

Photo courtesy of Lynn Roth.

In “Shepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog,” viewers experience the tragedy of the Holocaust from the perspective of a loving and protective German Shepherd named Kaleb. 

First the beloved pet of Jewish boy Joshua, Kaleb is given away when Jews are no longer allowed to have pets and Joshua and his family are forced to move away. Kaleb goes on a winding journey after that, living briefly with other families and ending up in a concentration camp as the helper of a Nazi soldier. 

The movie is based off of the 2007 Israeli novel “The Jewish Dog," which follows a similar story. Its unique and lovable narrator opens the tragic event to be told in a completely new way, and in one that’s especially accessible to children and families. 

We spoke to Jewish writer and director Lynn Roth about making the movie and why the Jewish tradition that surrounds it is so important. 

Religion Unplugged: Thank you for sharing with us! Talk about your faith and how it led you to this movie.

Lynn Roth: I would love to. I'm Jewish, and I was brought up in a very culturally Jewish world. My father was a rabbi, and many of my uncles and cousins are Cantor's [family name]. I come from that kind of a family, so I'm deeply entrenched in Jewish life and Jewish tradition. And my father was always interested in all religions. 

In fact, I still have a lot of his library, which was extensive. There are books on every religion in the world that he learned a lot from. He loved researching other religions to see how similar some of them were.

"You know that it seems like we all came from the same place — from the source," he would say. "From the original source."

RUP: I've seen that the story of this movie is inspired by an Israeli novel. How did you discover that novel, and what was its role in the development of the movie?

Roth: I was teaching a class on film in Israel about seven years ago. One of my students came and pitched an idea about a book that a friend of his was writing. And when I heard this idea, I knew that I had to make this film. I thought, what an interesting topic that brought up so many ideas for me. 

The book was a little bit more sardonic than my movie. This movie is being done in a more traditional way because I wanted to reach as broad a base as possible. And I wanted young people to be able to see it. I thought it was a very good way to enter the subject matter. 

RUP: The novel is narrated by the dog and follows the dog's point of view, and I noticed that in the movie as well. There's a stretch of several minutes in the middle of the movie where it's only dogs. What was it like making the dog the main character of the movie?

Roth: It was fantastic. I'm a huge dog lover, and I think that if we just learn from dogs we would be a better species ourselves. Humanity would improve by trying to learn things from dogs like loyalty and forgiveness — all these marvelous qualities that these animals have. 

RUP: Expand on what the audience gets whenever they're seeing the world and seeing the movie just through the eyes of the dogs.

Roth: There is an emotion that dogs bring out in us that is sometimes even stronger than the way we feel about our friends and family. Maybe because they can't talk, you know, maybe because they express themselves through their eyes and through their actions. 

But there were times where I feel that I could portray something with so much more emotion because it would come in through a dog: for example, when the dog leaves the new family and runs back to his home. He goes up there, and he finds other people living in his home. And we all know that during that time, the Jews were taken away and the Germans moved into their homes and took over. And that dog sitting in front of that house waiting for his owners to come out, or to come back, is a heightened way to make that point. 

RUP: I noticed specifically near the beginning a lot of comparisons like you said before where the dog is kind of experiencing the same thing that Jewish people were at the time.

Roth: Exactly, exactly. When the dog is captured and is in the pound, they separate the dogs from the ones in the two different trucks. Some go to the truck to the right; some go to the truck to the left. So, yes, I was using the experience of the dogs to be comparable to what happened to the Jews and to many other people during that time.

RUP: Something that stood out to me was the emphasis placed on the Jewish traditions, particularly the Passover celebrations that you see, both at the beginning and near the end. Talk about these traditions and how you chose to portray them.

Roth: It's the word that we used before — it's faith, you know, what makes us human, what keeps us going. And by recreating the Seder in the forest, Joshua was using his faith and his tradition to survive. 

We recreated the memory of when he was with his family and his mother and father and sister, and just for him to visualize that. And, of course, in the section where he’s dipping the greens into the salt water, he used his own tears as the salt water. Oh, I'm getting choked up. But that's his faith. 

RUP: One of my favorite scenes in the movies is when Joshua asks a religious man why he prays all the time and implies that God isn’t listening. The man says, “The important thing is that I can hear the prayer.” What’s the meaning of that line? 

Roth: Actually, that's a line that my father used to say all the time. I put it into the movie because people would always ask, “Do you believe in God, who is God, what is God and does God hear your prayers?” He would say to them, “The important thing is that you hear the prayer. You hear the prayer.” So I just love things like that.

I think prayer is an important thing. It's sacred. It's humbling. It's gratitude, and it's something that helps us evolve spiritually. And to be spiritual beings is to be at a higher level. 

“Shepherd: The Story of a Jewish Dog” will be in theaters on May 28. 

Jillian Cheney is a Poynter-Koch fellow for Religion Unplugged who loves consuming good culture and writing about it. She also reports on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.